Colorado spending $208M on empty prison

Declining population, regulation changes make solitary cells unneeded

Colorado State Penitentiary II in Canon City, built to house inmates in solitary confinement, sits empty.
(Aaron Ontiveros/Denver Post)

CAON CITY -- Last month, Colorado shut down a brand-new prison it didn't need.

Unless the state government finds someone else who can use it, Colorado taxpayers can expect to spend $208 million for an empty building.

Finding someone else may not be easy. Colorado State Penitentiary II, also known as Centennial South, consists of 948 solitary-confinement cells. It has no dining room, no gym, no rooms where a group of prisoners could take classes or go to therapy or get vocational training. It's row after identical row of empty cells.

From the beginning, critics of this project objected, correctly, that Colorado was putting people in solitary confinement at a rate that dwarfed the national average.

Yet it was built.

It was built even though most legislators opposed the prison in 2003, according to a key player. Another bit of legislative ingenuity overcame that problem. The sponsors lumped the prison with a new University of Colorado medical campus and gained bipartisan support for two projects financed without a vote of the people.

Separately, neither project would have passed, according to Republican Norma Anderson, the Senate majority leader and bill sponsor in 2003.

"You couldn't get the votes for either one of them," said Anderson, now a former legislator living in Lakewood.

Republicans wanted the prison, Democrats the hospitals, and "that's the only reason they were put together," she said. "It's very simple.

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The other key players in the project were Republican co-sponsor Lola Spradley, House speaker in 2003 and resident of Beulah -- prison country; Ari Zavaras, corrections chief for two Democratic governors; and Joe Ortiz, the corrections chief for a Republican governor.

And the statisticians who predicted prison populations played a part. The Division of Criminal Justice, for one, foresaw numbers of Colorado prisoners going up and up. Instead the prison population declined along with the crime rate, while judges sentenced fewer people to prison. Today, Colorado holds about 7,500 fewer prisoners than forecast six years ago.

Opened over objections

Colorado State Penitentiary II was built without a vote of the people, a requirement for Colorado projects that increase state debt, and in spite of a warning from the state treasurer that the voters should decide.

The legislature resorted instead to a financing method called "certificates of participation." Rather than borrow money to build its own prison, the state sold certificates to investors, becoming the operator of a prison owned by a multitude of lenders.

Cells inside Colorado State Penitentiary II were designed for solitary confinement.
(AARON ONTIVEROZ)

The prison was built despite a 2005 Colorado Department of Corrections report from its own staff confirming that Colorado held three times as many people in solitary confinement as the average state prison system.

It finally opened in 2010, over renewed objections that Colorado didn't need it. The corrections department, in turn, won the fight to open it with a misleading claim that most states actually held more prisoners in what the department calls "administrative segregation."

Now it's empty.

Kent Lambert, a Republican state senator from Colorado Springs, agreed to open the prison in 2010 as a Joint Budget Committee member. This year, after voting to close it, he said he and other legislators feel deceived.

Corrections officials lobbied vigorously to open it, citing "a growing population of violent prisoners," inadequate facilities and a trend toward more dangerous offenders, Lambert said. Now, some legislators "felt they were being lied to."

Actually, "those numbers were driven by bad policy, the excess of administrative segregation and the lack of adequate review" for inmates, Lambert said. "If you put people in administrative segregation for years, in some cases even decades without adequate review, we have some potentially serious human-rights violations."

Ari Zavaras, the department's executive director in 2010, said he never meant to deceive anyone.

At the time, he said, administrative segregation beds were full, leaving no place to put offenders if there was a murder, riot or violent fight.

"I really felt we had a need," he said. If in doubt, "I err on the side of inmate safety and officer safety."

The Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, a group that opposed the prison from the start, now questions whether the state will be able to sublet 948 solitary confinement cells.

"The bottom line is we never needed that prison to begin with," said the coalition's Christie Donner, "so it's lose-lose."

None of the repeated objections to building a new solitary confinement prison was heeded until last year, when Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper took office and appointed a new corrections chief, Tom Clements.

Within months, Clements brought in consultants from the National Institute of Corrections to take an independent look at Colorado's solitary confinement system.

Here's what they reported:

About 7 percent of Colorado prisoners are kept in "administrative segregation," compared to a national average of 1 to 2 percent.

The average length of stay in solitary cells is about two years.

Most in solitary confinement "are not being disruptive and have not been disruptive for some time."

The solitary confinement population in Colorado kept growing even as its overall prison population declined.

About four of 10 offenders in the system ultimately go straight from cells where they were confined 23 hours a day to the streets.

The proportion of prisoners with known mental health problems had grown from 22 percent to 40 percent in 11 years.

Clements said he was particularly disturbed by how often "we were taking inmates in restraints to the bus station" and removing the handcuffs there.

"That was a very compelling factor for us," he said.

This year, state legislators unanimously agreed to close the prison.

Challenge to "re-purpose"

As corrections department spokeswoman Katherine Sanguinetti walks down a barren hallway of Colorado State Penitentiary II, her heels click audibly. It's that quiet.

The last inmates were moved out in October, along with correctional officers, teachers, medical staff and counselors. Except for the kitchen and laundry, which will serve inmates elsewhere in a six-prison complex, the prison closed Nov. 1.

Sanguinetti outlined the challenges of "re-purposing" this place.

"There is no classroom space. There is no program space, no outdoor recreation, no dining hall," she said.

From one hallway to another, the prison consists of rows of empty cells, identical but for their door colors.

It was built for prisoners confined at the highest level of security, who spent 23 hours a day in the cell. In the remaining hour, they could take a shower and exercise in a bare 25-foot corridor with pull-up handles at one end.

Each cell came with a shiny metal toilet and sink, a thin gray mattress, a plastic bin for belongings, clothes hooks and a computerized kiosk.

The kiosk provided the links to the world outside. Without leaving their cells, inmates could order library books or shampoo, watch TV, take prison classes, communicate with counselors and make phone calls to relatives visible on a remote screen in Cañon City or Denver.

Meals came through a slot in the door. Before an inmate left the cell, he would "cuff up" -- back up to the slot, put his hands out and get handcuffed before the door opened.

The prison, a gray concrete building with three towers of cells, was erected in an expansive prison complex beneath the sandstone bluffs of Cañon City.

The prisons within range from small minimum security buildings that look more like assisted-living homes, with yards and flower gardens, to maximum security facilities.

On the grounds, spread over 9 square miles across the Arkansas River from a Cañon City park, inmates with outdoor privileges grow grapes, Honeycrisp apples and tilapia. They milk cows and goats and a herd of water buffalo, whose milk is used to make mozzarella cheese for gourmet markets. They tame wild horses to be sold and adopted.

Who might use the empty prison on these grounds? Possibly the Federal Bureau of Prisons, whose Supermax prisons rely on similar conditions of solitary confinement.

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